Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, pursuant to the Answer of 4 March 2015 to Question 225665, what work her Department undertook between 2011 and 2014 to implement the review of the Prevent Strategy in 2011, and what evaluation was undertaken of that work.

The Department for Education set up a dedicated unit, the Due Diligence and Counter Extremism Group, now a director-led group, to lead its contribution to the Prevent strategy, in particular by working to reduce the risk of unsuitable individuals and organisations from gaining influence over schools and strengthening regulatory frameworks.

The Department has carried out due diligence checks to establish the suitability of individuals and organisations seeking to become involved in schools and in other activity involving children and young people. Work on strengthening regulatory frameworks includes, but is not limited to, amending the standards applying to institutions, teachers and governors to require them to conduct themselves in a way which is compatible with fundamental British values and enabling the Secretary of State and others to take action where they fail to do so. Ofsted has strengthened the school inspections handbook so that inspectors take account of how well schools promote fundamental British values, and protect pupils from the risks of extremism and radicalisation, when judging their effectiveness.

A number of local Prevent projects, funded by the Home Office, engage schools and supplementary schools and train teachers in priority areas. The Home Office has established a monitoring framework to evaluate the local delivery of Prevent project funding to local authorities. The process for allocating funds requires projects to be evidence-based with clear steps to evaluate activity. The Office for Security and Counter-Terrorism (OSCT) collates the evidence from projects it funds in order to evaluate consistently across similar projects.